Week 5

July 19th, 2013

This week has been mostly cleaning up the data I have and preparing my laptop for fieldwork. I've been trying to load all the software I've been using so I can work on my data in the field. It's been kind of a hassle, but I've learned a lot about Linux in the process, which has been nice. I'm also trying to learn some GMT so I can plot mantle flow predictions against shear wave splitting in Eastern Canada. GMT is a bit of a syntaxual nightmare. Every command needs about 5-2000 modifier things (not sure what the technical term is) and each of those has, from what I've picked up on, close to infinite possiblities of input. People say it's great once you've figured it out. It does make pretty plots, but the learning curve seems pretty intense. Someone (who has a lot of time on their hands, and a big heart) should make a GUI for it. But considering it's been around for 25 years, it's probably not gonna get one anytime soon, so I should just hunker down and work on learning the syntax. Thankfully it's well documented. So far, in my attempts to plot the mantle flow predictions, I have drawn a beautiful line on my map which does not seem to correlate to the data in any way, the color of which I have full control of, which I guess is a win for the day. Much learning is ahead!